


Lyanna

by TeriyakiPrinces



Category: A Song of Ice and Fire - George R. R. Martin, Game of Thrones (TV)
Genre: F/M, Gen, Ghosts, Sansa-centric, Supernatural Elements
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-08-16
Updated: 2017-08-16
Packaged: 2018-12-16 00:23:05
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,254
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11817315
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TeriyakiPrinces/pseuds/TeriyakiPrinces
Summary: Sansa Stark can see ghosts and this fact has never terrified her.





	Lyanna

**Author's Note:**

> This is a One-Shot, and my first Game of Thrones fanfic. Please tell me what you think!

Sansa Stark watches as the fat King steps from his mounting block after dismounting his horse. She does not recognize the figure at his side, but the older man looks sad when he looks to her father, and for a moment her heart  _aches._

His translucent arm passes through her father’s shoulders as the old man’s spectre tries to touch him. That is when she sees that he is not only grey because of the melancholy feel of Winterfell’s courtyard, but because he is dead.

She tears her eyes away from the ghost when King Robert Baratheon steps in front of her and she can smell his wine-sour breath.

* * *

When both her father and the king have left the crypts to prepare for the welcome feast, she descends the stairs into the darkness where her ancestors lay forever more. The life-sized statues are said to hold the likeness of the Starks that they mark the graves of, but she knows that that is not true. Torrhen Stark’s statue boasts a face of smooth planes and slyly down-turned eyes, hooded as if tired of his eternal vigil over his own bones. The true Torrhen Stark stares back at her from his seat upon the raised platform his own iron sword rests its tip upon, and she sees his eyes are tired, yes, but their corners are ever-so-slightly upturned, and she can see the almond shape they hold even through the crow’s feet extending from the outer corners. He looks defeated and old, something his rigid statue does not portray in the slightest.

But she passes her great ancestors by, the only sound in the crypts being the swishing of her skirts’ fabric and the crackle of her torch. It is something she does not need, per say, but it would look suspicious to anyone else if she were to descend into the darkness of the final resting place of the members of the House of Stark, lit only by the dim glow of ghosts, seen only by her.

The spectres never make a sound as they move, a scarce inch or two above the ground, and she has only once had one speak to her, and that was long ago when she still had not understood that she’s the only one who can see these reminders of the past.

She reaches her destination within ten minutes, taking hidden passageways to cut the time shorter. Four tombs are stood side by side at this end of the long corridor in the depths below her Northern home. There is never anyone here to haunt the resting place of her father’s family, as whatever remained of her ancestors were more inclined to stand before their own tombs in the upper crypts. She had once seen a ghost before her late grandfather’s tomb, but it had disappeared around another hidden passage before she got too close, a spectral cloak sweeping behind it.

What she is most thankful for when it came to her strange ability was that she needn’t see the persons in the state that they were in after their deaths, but just before. She thinks mayhap she would have gone mad with grief and terror if that weren’t the case.

She does not know why this part of the crypts is so abandoned, or why everyone that has ever died did not seem to lurk in the material plane, but it gives her hope that maybe, just maybe, there is hope for a life beyond this one.

But that is not why she is here. She means to pay her own respects to her most immediate family, as she does every time Winterfell celebrates something. She sits there for hours, sometimes, in total silence as she fantasizes about what her life would be like if the Mad King had not been so, if her grandfather and uncle had not been burned alive when demanding the return of her father’s sister, Lyanna. She oft sings in the silence when it becomes too much for her, a weight on her shoulders as if the statues of her family were staring down at her from their perches.

She has just turned to set her torch in a bracer on the wall when a biting wind tears through the corridor and the light is snuffed out, leaving her trembling in the darkness. Her startled cry reverberates in the caverns, filling the space and making her tense. She begins to panic and get angry at whomever had decided to open the crypt’s doors, when she sees the dim light approaching her from down the aisle.

The colours are always drained from the living dead, but the shade of their hair and skin and their cloaks and dresses hold still the barest hint of the colour they once wore in life. Black hair, grey hair, or even blonde and red (as rare as they are in the North), silver eyes of every shade and pale skin are all things that the Northern ghosts have in common. She has become used to it.

But the figure that approaches holds only something of the pallor she is so used to seeing amongst the denizens of her home. Everything else is as unfamiliar to her as the king she has just met.

He – for it is a he, she can see it now in the breadth of his shoulders if not in the length of his hair and the grace with which he strides in his spectral form – wears armour that melds with the darkness she sees all around her, giving off less light than is usual from the shades she sees. Small pinpricks of light form a design upon his breastplate, and his hair is unbound and shines brighter than the strands of silver the elder Starks bore could ever be.

When the light he casts illuminates her form in the darkness, the man – lord, he must be a lord – stops in his tracks, nary a whisper escaping him. His eyes – there is something blue about them, Sansa thinks – widen as he stares at her, and she realizes that he must not have seen her as he made his way to this part of the crypts. She fidgets at his gazes intensity and, gods, how can a dead man’s gaze be so heated, and looks down at her feet. Her skin, pale as it is already, is even more washed out in the dim light. Her red hair looks almost black, and she thinks mayhap she likes how it looks – maybe she wouldn’t be constantly compared to her Southron Lady of a Mother, if she had her father’s dark hair – and then she flinches at her thoughts because she loves her mother and her red hair and Tully blue eyes. But this reminds her as well of the ice that runs through her veins, the same blood that she shares with her Lord Father, and steels her nerves to look up into the dead lord’s eyes.

He has moved even closer, a scarce two feet from her now, and whispers a name she has heard all her life, in stories told by the hearth in her Father’s solar.

She takes a step back and only vaguely realizes she is falling as the man’s hand passes through her as if trying to catch her fall, and _those eyes do not have_ blue _in them_ she realizes all at once as her head rushes with the knowledge of who the ghost before her _is_.

.

.

.

 _Lyanna,_ he whispers.


End file.
